Patent document 1 discloses a navigation system, which stores information on POIs such as a gas station, convenience store, or the like as POI data and provides a user with the stored information on POIs.
Patent document 2 discloses a technology, which accurately locates a site where a POI is present and provides the located site of the POI for a use.                Patent document 1: JP-A-2004-286653        Patent document 1: JP-A-2005-338032        
The above-mentioned POI data may be used for controlling a vehicle or in-vehicle device; namely, a certain vehicle control process may be activated when the vehicle stops off at a certain POI. When a vehicle stops off at a gas station, the following vehicle control processes take place according to the corresponding POI: (i) Operation of automatically opening a fuel lid (or filler cap) or (ii) Operation of automatically resetting a trip meter. Further, whether the foregoing operation should be automatically executed or not is automatically asked a user and the foregoing operation is executed based on the response from the user.
To achieve an operation triggered or activated when the vehicle stops off at a POI, a stop-off at a POI needs to be accurately recognized.
To recognize a stop-off at a POI by a navigation system, positional information on POI and a vehicular swept path may be simply compared to each other. For instance, the positional information on POI is indicated by a longitude and latitude, a geographical range, or the like; the vehicular swept path may be calculated from both satellite measurement using GPS, and autonomous navigation.
However, the swept paths computed from the satellite measurement and the autonomous navigation have errors, so stop-off at a POI may not be accurately recognized by simply comparing the positional information on POI with the swept path.